


When Dawns Were Young

by alienor_woods



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Challenges, F/M, river witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 04:49:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14012535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alienor_woods/pseuds/alienor_woods
Summary: Ned and Jon are not the only ones who keep to their old gods.





	When Dawns Were Young

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "[The Negro Speaks of Rivers](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44428/the-negro-speaks-of-rivers)" by Langston Hughes.
> 
> Originally posted Oct. 25, 2013. Written for the Game of Ships Ghost Ships Challenge.

***

 

_"We are descended from the river goddess Melusina.” – Jacquetta Woodville (The White Queen)_

 

***

 

Sansa tries to be _good_ in King’s Landing, she truly does.

 

Knights are anointed in the eyes of the Seven, after all. She and Joffrey were to marry before the High Septon in the Great Sept of Baelor and Queen Cersei is devoted to her vigils in front of the Mother’s statue. Lady Catelyn had brought Sansa up in the small, cozy sept that had not yet taken on the musty odor that the older parts of Winterfell held, had gently prompted her to recite each deity’s prayers and to be mindful in her reading of the Seven-Pointed Star. It is this structure and those memories that Sansa finds comfort in when Joffrey is harsh with her, when she gets frustrated with Arya, even when her lord father is accused of treason.

 

She is to be a Baratheon, to be Queen, to be married to the man who is charged with the patronage of the Faith, and Sansa wants _so badly_ to be worthy of those titles and the women that came before her.

 

Even when her father is executed and Arya goes missing, even when Joffrey casts her aside for Lady Margaery, Sansa turns her face to the heart tree in the godswood and her back to Blackwater Rush and prays to her father’s gods. Surely they would help her now, with Father’s soul amongst them and with Jon so close to the Haunted Forest at the Wall. She prays for Robb’s victory and Joffrey’s death and for Winterfell, built under the auspices of the Old Gods. Some called her a Princess of Winterfell now, and shouldn’t that count for something?

 

Then they take her name in return for a cloak of red and gold, the Imp calls her his _charming,_ _dutiful wife_ , Robb and her beautiful, lovely lady mother are killed, and Sansa can bear it no longer.

 

It’s good, though, that she’s waited so long—her mother has always said that she must be sure, because once the magic is out, it cannot be reeled back in. Every fiber of Sansa’s body trembles with rage, not fear or nerves, as she waits for a waning moon, just like her mother had done during the Greyjoy Rebellion when Sansa had been but girl clutching at her skirts.

 

(Lady Catelyn had hitched Sansa high on her hip, carried her down to the hot springs below Winterfell’s Keep, beyond the severe faces of the Kings of Winters Past. Droplets had splashed onto Sansa’s skin, causing her to cry out, but her mother had hushed her: “Just as the blood of the First Men runs through your veins, so does the blood of the river goddess Sionanne.” Sansa doesn’t remember much else, just the sharp pain as her mother plucked a bright copper hair from her head and nicked her finger with a blade. She’d dropped a bundle of wooden dolls into the channel, let the hot water carry them out of sight, and taken Sansa back to bed, whispering secrets meant only for daughters of Sionanne.)

 

The incline to Blackwater Rush is steep and slippery. Sansa nearly tumbles more than once as she heads for a rocky outcropping at the bottom. Sensing her approach, the water laps at the rocks, beckoning her, calling for her. Sansa knows that it would welcome the slide of her body into its cold embrace, that it would feel like home, but she’s not yet ready. She crouches on the ledge and pulls out the figure she’d made with a handful of dried grass from the godswood and wrapped in scraps of red, black, and gold cloth. With a sharp tug, she plucks a hair from her head and twines it about the figure’s torso. The blade of one of her husband’s daggers flashes in the light, and she swipes her bloody finger across the figure’s head.

 

The silvery water ripples in the moonlight, the peaks of the waves reaching for the figure in her hand. Sansa leans out over the ledge and lowers her mouth to the water’s surface. “Joffrey Baratheon, First of His Name,” she whispers and drops the figure into the water.

 

Her fingers dip into the coldwet of Blackwater Rush and—

 

_White naked skin—too soft in the teeth of the beast with big paws and claws that belong North far North—feet inside paws belong to me—blood of my blood of my blood—_

 

—Sansa falls back against the ledge of the cliff, crying out for her mother and sister and Nymeria.

 

The river listens to her grief, tastes the salt from her tears that slip to the rocks, into the waves below, and wraps itself around Joffrey Baratheon, First of His Name, pulling him down into its dark and frigid depths.

 

***

 

Petyr gives her a new name and new hair and spirits her away to the Vale. Her aunt Lysa is everything that her once-beautiful lady mother is not, and Sansa watches in confusion as Petyr flatters and cajoles and panders to her aunt Lysa. He’d once claimed to love her lady mother, yet now he repeats those words to Lysa with such sincerity, even as his eyes follow every movement Sansa makes.

 

Lysa jerks Sansa out of her room one bright afternoon. “Come, Alayne,” she hisses. “Before the guards return to the gardens.” Her aunt leads her to the fountain in the middle of the snow-covered gardens, looking over her shoulder the whole way. “ _Quickly_.”

 

It’s an egg from the kitchens, its yolk missing. Sansa wants to protest that it’s wrong, all wrong: the moon is waning again, not waxing, they need to wait until just before dawn, and the shell is cracked from the hasty breaths her aunt Lysa had blown into it. But Lysa has none of it, her voice rising in pitch, insisting that the intent is what matters most, not the “little trickeries.”

 

“Petyr will be so happy when I am pregnant,” Lysa tells her, voice quivering. “He will be so pleased. Now, you know what to do.”

 

(Sansa, Arya, and their mother had knelt over the hot springs only a few years past, after Catelyn’s womb had twice quickened and bled after Bran’s birth. They’d all three kissed the eggshell and, with gritted teeth, dipped the eggshell into the hot water once, twice, thrice, letting the water carry it away before it could empty again.)

 

So Sansa kisses the egg after her aunt and helps her aunt sink the egg into the ice water of the fountain five times, each time watching the water well through the slender crack stretching halfway up the shell. Finally, they let it drift to the bottom of the fountain’s basin. “A son...give me another son,” Lysa implores the trickling water, but her moon blood flows and Lysa glares at Sansa like it’s all her fault.

 

And then she flies, and Sansa watches her fall away against a field of green and white, no blue in sight.

 

 _She’ll never get home_ , Sansa realizes, and closes her eyes.

 

***

 

Across the Narrow Sea, Arya sits on a bridge over the Long Canal and writes her list in blood on a scrap of paper. She knows how to make the dolls, how to ask the water to take vengeance on her enemies, but they were her lives to take, not the river’s. The Seven Kingdoms were far away, so this would have to do for now. “I curse you,” she hisses at the names. In the light of the full moon, she spits on the names, crumples the paper in her fist, and drops it into the canal.

 

***

 

Winterfell is naught but a shell when she urges her mare through the gates, blackened and crumbled. Her eyes move upwards in muscle memoric strokes, looking for the rise of towers that now lie in crumbled heaps on the ground. Only the Great Keep looks like it has been rebuilt, but the workmanship seems shoddy and hastily-done. Jon’s odd assortment of wildlings and black brothers and mountain men flow into the courtyard behind her, as well as her own Vale soldiers and the Stark men that had followed the two of them North instead of returning to their holdfasts at the end of the Great War.

 

So lost is she in her own world that she does not notice Samwell Tarly’s appearance at her side until he lays a gentle hand on her knee. “Take him to the Lord’s bedchamber,” Sansa tells him, but he drops his eyes and tells her that he does not know the way. She shakes her head and apologizes. “Of course not. I’ll show you.”

 

Four brothers of the Night’s Watch follow Sansa and Sam through the Great Keep, picking their way carefully along so as to not jostle Jon on the crude stretcher they’d put together. Sansa strips her parent’s bed of its bedclothes and Sam helps her to flip the mattress over. She gathers the bedclothes into her arms, busying herself so that she does not see Jon grimace and groan when they move him onto the bed. “Fresh linens and furs from the caravan,” she says to one of the brothers, handing him the sooty bedclothes. Another builds a fire in the grate while Sam strips Jon to his smallclothes.

 

Sansa had only heard stories about how Jon had been near death after a faction within the Night’s Watch attempted to kill him, how he’d languished for a day and a night before they grew impatient and threw him on a pyre anyway, only for him to get up and climb off with nary a burn mark. Angry red slashes cover his skin now now, remnants from when he’d been separated from his men in battle. Sam had done his best to bind him up, and Jon had been cogent for a few days, but he’d faded quickly thereafter.

 

His curls stick to his sweaty forehead now, and Sansa sits at the edge of his bed to brush them away. He mumbles her name and opens his glassy grey eyes. “Sansa,” he whispers again with cracked lips. She shushes him and leans over to press a kiss to the corner of his mouth.

 

“We’re home, Jon.” A clammy hand brushes against her stomach—she can feel the heat through the wool—and he babbles about heart trees and names and birthrights and she strokes his beard and shakes her head. “Sleep, Jon. Sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning, I promise.”

 

Sam hovers behind her, and when she rises from the bed, he bends his head. “We should send a raven to the Queen, my Lady.” His voice is heavy with regret and finality, and Sansa shakes her head.

 

“No, not yet. Maybe...” her throat closes off. Sam nods, understanding.

 

He's not ready either.

 

Sansa spends the afternoon and evening at Jon’s side, adjusting the furs over his shivering body and swiping cool cloths over his forehead. As the sun sets, she leans her hip against the sill of the window and stares across the shattered skyline of Winterfell.

 

The state of her home is ten times worse than anything she had ever imagined; how is it that a castle that had stood since the Age of Heroes could have been destroyed so easily? The day that she had left Winterfell for King’s Landing, even the First Keep had still been habitable—there had been nothing that a few days of cleaning and airing out wouldn’t have fixed.

 

Sansa’s heart skips a beat, a cold sweat breaks out across the back of her neck. She fastens her cloak around her shoulders and rushes down corridors and stairwells until she’s heaving at the twisted door of the crypt until she pants from exertion. It takes two mountain men to pull the door from its hinges, and she accepts a torch from them, but declines an escort. “I need to pay my respects,” she tells them, and descends into the caverns below the castle.

 

She nearly weeps when she sees the statues of the Kings of Winters Past sitting stoicly intact, but she strides past them, turning right then left then right again until the sound of water, flowing without impediment, fills her ears.

 

Relief and exhaustion finally brings her to her knees at the edge of the gurgling springs. She sets the torch in a natural notch in the rock floor, not caring that it leans at a perilous angle. In her mind’s eye, she sees the Winterfell of her childhood as though it were yesterday, and Jon’s slow smile when she’d asked him to come North with her instead of going South with his aunt. They’d promised to rebuild Winterfell together; it was what they talked of over meals, to pass the time as their armies marched together along the ever-winding roads of the Seven Kingdoms, even late at night after they’d had their fill of each other’s sweat-slicked skin and kiss-plumped lips.

 

“What will I do without him?” she asks the babbling water. “He can’t leave me now—I need him here with _me_.”

 

Jon’d told everyone who’d listened that _Sansa_ was Robb’s heir, that Winterfell was _hers_ , and had never once questioned any of her decisions in front of their councilors. He’d privately offer any guidance he’d had for her, and if it had ever shifted her judgment, he’d claimed no credit.

 

He’d let her lead in politics and in their tent, loving to watch her move over him just as much as she loves the weight of his body pressing down onto her. And now her womb has quickened, and Sansa wants to scream at the thought of Jon finally fathering the child he’d never let himself dream of, and dying before ever holding it in his arms.

 

She tells the water everything, all of the secrets that she’d whispered to Jon and others she’d not told a soul, until her throat is dry and fatigue washes over her like a crashing wave. The rock is warm under her cheek, and she distantly watches the torchlight bounce across the surface of the water and up onto the walls of the cavern. The water babbles to her, and she listens to its wet rush, letting it lull her into a strange state of waking sleep. The gentle rumble of the water through the rock soothes the fear that has permeated Sansa’s limbs ever since Jon’s knees had given out from under him.

 

 _daughter_ , the water murmurs. _my blood_.

 

“What should I do?” Sansa answers.

 

 _Bring him to me_.

 

***

 

Sam eventually finds her, tipped off by the men that had watched her enter the crypts. When he taps her shoulder, hesitant, unsure, she jerks upright as if from a dream, though she’s not slept a wink.

 

“He’s calling for you,” Sam tells her, offering his hand. The water chatters behind her, reminding her, and she nods.

 

The fire has made Jon’s room stifling hot, yet he still shivers under the pile of furs. “I’m so cold, Sansa,” he mumbles, and she presses a kiss to his forehead before she strips it all away.

 

“My Lady Sansa!” Sam exclaims, but she continues without pause.

 

“We’re going to the godswood,” she tells the both of them, and Jon’s friends and brothers that had been sitting vigil tug him onto the stretcher once more.

 

“No,” Jon croaks, reaching for her. “I’m not ready to leave you. Not yet. I’m not ready.”

 

“You won’t,” Sansa reassures him, and holds his hand the whole way to the godswood. The horizon is just beginning to pinken, the sun still below the horizon, and Sansa is thankful that Sam found her at just the right moment. The brothers veer towards the heart tree, undoubtedly to lay Jon underneath it, but Sansa calls out to stop them and points at pools a few yards away. They’re fed by the same springs that run below the Keep, and the steam that rises from their surfaces and disperses among the trees casts the godswood in a preternatural fog otherwise unheard of in deep winter.

 

Uncaring of the supposedly-chaste eyes of the black brothers, Sansa casts aside her cloak, toes off her boots, unlaces her dress, until she’s left only in her shift. She steps down into the pool, pacing the perimeter of it until she finds a portion of it that is wide enough to sit on. “Bring him to me,” she commands, and the men glance at each other before hauling Jon off of his stretcher.

 

It’s awkward and Jon groans and cries out as he’s jostled and nearly dropped more than once. Finally, they lower him into the water, and Sansa wraps her arms under his and hauls his back against her chest. He shakes at the hot water seeping through his bandages and onto the raw skin underneath. From Sam’s furrowed brow, Sansa surmises that he believes Jon won’t survive this.

 

The water swirls around their legs as it flows from one side of the pool to the other. Father hadn’t let them play in the pools as children because of his fear that they would swim too deep and be swept away underground. Only when they understood the danger were they allowed to splash at each other near the edges, far away from the dark, deep middle channel.

 

Jon’s head lolls against her shoulder and Sansa presses her cheek to his. “Are you still cold?” she asks, and he shakes his head, his eyelashes fluttering against his skin. “We’re going to rest here a while, Jon. It will warm you up and make you feel better.”

 

By the time the sun peeks over the horizon, even Sam has gone to find some breakfast, shaking his head as he shuffled away, leaving Jon and Sansa alone in the godswood. Sansa closes her eyes and rests her head against the rocky lip of the pool—the warm water keeps Jon’s body from weighing too heavily on her. Her hair, copper-colored again now that the brown has faded, floats across the surface of the water until it has draped itself across Sansa’s shoulders and Jon’s chest and arms. Time passes slowly, and Sansa listens with disinterested ears as the castle awakens and begins to bustle with the new day. Her focus is on Jon’s steadily beating heart, his deep breaths, the intermittent twitches of his limbs, the nonsense he mutters in his sleep.

 

She dozes alongside him as the sun passes overhead, until the deep, fast-flowing water tugs at her toes and the surface water laps at her arms to awaken her. Against her breast, Jon stirs and places a hand over hers. “Sansa,” he slurs with closed eyes, rolling his head to rest his forehead against her chin. Across the pool, Sam rises to his feet with wide eyes.

 

“We’re ready, Sam,” Sansa tells him. “Everything is going to be fine.”

 

***

 

Moons later, Jon peers down at their daughter nestled between them in bed with a queer look on his face. “What is it?” Sansa asks, and reaches out to run her knuckles over his beard.

 

He shakes his head, as if he were shaking off a chill, and lifts his eyes to hers. “Nothing. Just thinking about the strangest dream I had while we were in the godswood that day.” Sansa rises up on her elbow to mirror him and cocks an eyebrow in question. He opens his mouth to speak, closes it, then finally says, “I dreamed...I was standing in a river, up to my waist in the water. This woman was staring at me from the middle of it, just her eyes above the water. She went underneath, and then she was in front of me, with all this...bright red hair covering her like a cloak. I asked who she was, and she said, ‘you are hers and she is mine.’ And then she reached into my chest and pulled out handfuls of...it looked like oil. Mud, maybe. Tar. She kept going, pulling it out of me until she was searching inside of me and finding nothing.”

 

He trails off and Sansa’s heart flutters against her ribs. _Thank you_ , she thinks. _Thank you,_ _Sionanne_. “What made you think of it?” she murmurs, when she can trust herself to speak without her voice cracking.

 

Jon’s brows pull together, they way they do when he pores over texts in their shared solar. “It’s just—I asked her why when she was done, and she told me that we were to share a daughter, and daughters to come, the blood of her blood.”

 

 _Daughters_. She leans across their daughter to kiss Jon, who hums in surprise but welcomes the slide of her tongue against his own. The infant coos at her parents, and Sansa bends down to press a gentle kiss to the girl’s head.

 

She’d been born in a basin of water, just like Sansa before her, and like Catelyn and Minisa before them, and so on back beyond the Age of Heroes. _The water gives us life, and to water we return_ , Catelyn had told her daughters when they’d watched her bring Rickon into the world.

 

“Sounds like we will have an active marriage,” Sansa japes lightly, fluffing the baby’s hair with her fingertips. “Hopefully with a few sons tucked in between all the girls.”

 

Jon snorts and presses their foreheads together to stare at the baby, whose slate-grey eyes flick between them. “You know I think that she should have Winterfell. Boy or no, she’s the first-born, and if she’s half as capable as her mother, she’ll make a fine Lady of Winterfell.”

 

Sansa can only smile and tilt her head to bump her husband’s nose with hers. Sometimes she wonders if the waters had sent him to her as well.

 

The night after Petyr Baelish had toyed with the laces of her gown, she’d saved a fishbone from dinner, heated it over a candle until it had cracked, and dropped it into the fountain in the garden. She’d asked for deliverance from the precarious hell she’d been living in, but she was also so lonely, wishing that if she were to be bedded, it would be by someone who loved _her_ and not her lady mother.

 

She’d poisoned Petyr herself, but he’d been right – the knights of the Vale had ridden behind her Tully hair and her Stark banner, and her host had run into Jon and his men not even a fortnight later. He’d stared up at her for a long beat, mouth parted and wide-eyed, before he reached for her outstretched hand and helped her from her mount.

 

Perhaps Lysa had been right—maybe Sionanne can hear the deepest wishes of her daughters’ hearts.

 

***

 

“Quietly, girls,” Sansa chides, pushing the door to the crypts wide and raising the torch above her head. She pats the heads of her daughters as they brush past her and begin down the stairs— _one, two, three_ , the youngest toddling through the doorway on unsteady legs. Sansa picks Rhaenys up and carries her down the steps, Lyanna and Jeyne skipping ahead of and chattering amongst themselves. Her large belly slows her down, and she calls out for her daughters to stay within the light. All four of her pregnancies have been easy, all three of her births quick and seamless, and Sansa feels like she could happily double her mother’s fruitfulness. She’s only just passed her twenty-fourth nameday, after all.

 

Jeyne was only a babe the last time she was here, so Lyanna takes her hand and leads her ahead of Sansa, only needing her direction corrected once, until the dull roar of rushing water fills their ears. “Left, girls, where the water runs swiftest. Not so close to the edge, Jeyne.”

 

Rhaenys babbles happily when Sansa sits down near the rushing water and pulls her into her lap.

 

She’d had made the four figures with straw from the stables the day before, and she directs Lyanna to pull them from the bag she’d slung across her shoulder. “Four strands of hair,” she directs the girls, tugging out her own and tilting Rhaenys’ silvery head to the side.

 

“Why, mother?” Jeyne asks, even as she hands over four dark strands.

 

“Because you are very special girls,” Sansa replies, stretching a hand out to cup her daughter’s cheek. “We are descended from the river goddess Sionanne, through my mother and her mother, and all our mothers that came before them. And when we need help, we ask the river to help us, and she will try her best.”

 

Lyanna looks down at the four figures in her hands, watching as Sansa twines the different-colored strands of hair around their bodies. “And papa needs our help?”

 

Sansa nods and unsheathes her dagger. Jeyne sniffs at the sharp pain, Lyanna grits her teeth, and Rhaenys cries out, the poor babe. Sansa hums a happy song in her ear and guides her finger over the faces of the figures.

 

“Now what?” Lyanna asks, when Sansa puts her own finger to her lips to suck the blood away.

 

“We give the river their names. You must remember, girls, that you cannot ask the river for trifles. Once the magic is done, it is done, and you cannot call it back,” Sansa tells them, shifting Rhaenys out of her lap and well beyond the edge of the hot spring. She collects the figures from Lyanna’s hands and kneels close enough to the water that her knees become damp from the splashing water.

 

Four men calling themselves the Kings Beyond the Wall have banded together to take control of the Wall, cut off the free passage through it, and re-establish an Independent Free-Folk Kingdom.

 

Jon called the banners and rode off two moons past. The most recent raven from Castle Black indicated a much harder battle than Jon had anticipated, full of underhanded tricks from the Four Kings, and more than one assassination attempt on Jon and the new Lord Commander's lives. Steady and sure, Sansa murmurs the names of the Four Kings to the river, one after the other, and drops the figures in.

 

The water laps towards her daughters, clutches at the dolls, whisks them down and away into the darkness. Tomorrow, it will listen to them pray to the heart tree that will carry their words far north beyond the wall, to the blood of her blood that sits still on his weirwood throne.

 

Let the Old Gods hear their prayers then. Right now, Sionanne’s daughters have need of her once more.

 


End file.
